


Obliteration

by shinychimera



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Academy Era, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coma, Drugged Sex, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 16:01:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/151006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bad experience drops Jim into a coma, and Bones fights to bring him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Obliteration

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "coma" square on my [**hc_bingo**](http://community.livejournal.com/hc_bingo/) card. Beta by my own personal ever-loyal McCrankypants, [**Yeomanrand**](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/pseuds/Yeomanrand).
> 
> [Posted](http://community.livejournal.com/kirk_mccoy/1316571.html) to [**kirk_mccoy**](http://community.livejournal.com/kirk_mccoy/)

“Knock it off, Jim — I’m not going.” Bones squinted grumpily at me over the edge of his padd, then looked back down.

“C’mon, studying isn’t _everything_. Don’t you ever want to go out and have a little fun?”

“I’ve had all the fun I need, kid. And what makes you think I wanna watch _you_ get drunk and let someone you just met slide into your panties? Tomcats in heat have more self respect, and are probably more fun to watch. I’ll stay home and index my results, thanks.”

“You’re a jerk, Bones,” I said ruefully, with a shrug and a smile. Better than sounding petulant. Or disappointed. Or angry.

“I know, I know,” he said, waving me off absent-mindededly. “I love you, too. Go on. Git.”

✦

San Francisco was full of glittering light, but I needed the darkness; I dove deep, moving from one dank bar to another, searching, hunting. Propositions aplenty but nothing I wanted until I found myself consumed by music in a shadowy warehouse, pressed between bodies on a sweaty dance floor. No words, no thought, nothing but noise vibrating bone. Hands on my skin, sweet and salt and sour in my mouth, concrete and spilled beer under my feet.

My head swayed and nodded, part of the music. Hands on my chest, arms around my shoulders, my shirt gone; pressing close to hard muscle and soft breasts, laughing crazily, tasting tongues. A girl kneeling in the green shadows, trying not to get stepped on by the surrounding crowd, stripping off my shoes and my pants and—

I blinked; the light strobed blue and people mouthed my skin, my nipples, my cock. I reached blindly for a kiss and it was there. The music jumped, one minute dreamy and slow, the next fast and hard and thrusting and yessss, this was what I needed, the music inside me, and I gave myself over to it, head dropping and I was caught, unclad bodies all around me holding me up while the drums pounded me and—

I was coming, in the music and the shadows, and I didn't know why, didn't know how I'd gotten there. The flashing colors were farther away now but I was naked on my hands and knees on layers of cheap sleeping bags over a hard floor, more hands and voices and—

Lying on the back seat of a car, giggling madly at the street lights flicking by, my head on someone's lap, the taste of smoke and semen and stripped self-respect in my throat and—

Stared at meaningless glowing green characters on a bedside table, my body limp and raw and beyond my control on a strange mattress in a strange room in a strange universe and—

Noise, assaulting me, clank and hum of trains, voices. "Where do you live, dude?" _Lie. Lie! Don’t embarrass the Academy, Bones, Captain Pike..._ My lips clumsy, tongue thick: "P'cific Heights..." Close enough to the end of the line. "Shit, dude, he's rich, let's get him out of here." Snickering tiredly again and—

"—not fair, Kirk, this is my room too, just because you want to party doesn't mean I should have to suffer." All right, this was getting scary. I stared intently at my roommate’s scraggly hairline, trying to figure out how the hell I had gotten back to our room. He frowned. "You are _really_ stoned."

I shook my head, pushed past him toward the shower, needing —

✦

Sat on the floor in the dark with a comm in my hands, wet and shivering, no idea whether I already had an active connection. Blinked heavily. Held down the quick-key for his comm.

“Bones—?”

Frustrated grunt on the line.

“M’sorry— I need—”

“You need a lesson in the courtesies of callin’ someone at—”

“—help....”

“Jim?”

A distant clatter.

“ _Jim!_ ”

✦

“—wrong with him, doctor?”

“We’re not sure yet, Captain.” Bones sounded tired, hollow, frustrated with me as usual. “He’s been attacked, obviously; physically he’s all healed up but some of this may be reaction to trauma. And he was dosed with something to make him compliant — but it was purged from his system hours ago and it shouldn’t have affected his level of consciousness in any case.”

 _I’m sorry._

“How soon—”

✦

“— _do_ this, Jim, we need you back.”

So cold. Struggled in vain to open my eyes, to make sense of sounds and echoes, beeps and thumps and distant voices, scents and textures that jumbled around me, pinning me down.

“Don’t give up, you’re too strong to give up. Too damn stubborn to run away. Dammit, _I_ need you.”

✦

“—can’t keep sleeping here, Leonard. He’s in good hands, let the nurses take care of him.”

“But what if...?”

“He’s stable and you know it — not a blip in three weeks. Go _home_ , get back to your normal schedule, or I’ll remove you as his physician of record.”

“Damn it, Captain!”

“I _know_. You’re researching what’s gone wrong, and no one knows his screwy physiology better than you do. But that’s getting less and less—”

✦

“—bend, two, three, four....”

Knee bent up against my chest, toes pushed up and back until they pointed painfully toward the ceiling, tomcat muscles compressed, trapped—

“And flex, two, three, four....”

Gasping, flinching, vision blurred by dazzle and tears—

“Jim! Jim, hold on, that’s it, I’ve got you, I thought a little physical activity might bring you...”

The brightness slipped, contracted around a face, a voice, intense hazel eyes.

“Jim? Stay with—!”

✦

Cold, icy cold everywhere, except where his radiantly warm hand clutched mine. Silence, everywhere, except for his choked whisper.

“I should never have said — it’s not what I meant, it’s not what I think of you, Jim. _Damn it_ , I wish to God I had just—”

✦

“—he’s in there still, will you listen to me? He might not be able to reach the surface just now but you can see he’s not brain dead.”

On my belly this time. Hands pressing into the muscles of my back, lotion soothing the itches in my skin.

“And you still think there’s reason for any sort of optimistic prognosis?” The gravelly doctor. M’Benga.

“I’m telling you, it’s some kind of allergy — he has autoimmune responses to dozens of known medications, this weird designer drug just set off some unexpected cascade somewhere. Interrupt the cycle and—”

✦

Motion, a squeaky wheel. Then warmth, enveloping warmth everywhere, and a body alongside mine in the bed.

“—like the sunshine, love? I’ve got to say, pasty white looks all wrong on you. Gonna get you outside as much as I can now that you’re out of that damn hospital.”

A hand on my face, tender with long familiarity. Frustration bubbled; I had only scraps of this Bones who _wanted_ to be with me.

“—got here today....ah, _Journal of Biomedical Ethics_ , your favorite....” Felt his head nestling against my shoulder; tried to hold on to his fading voice as he rambled. “...quantitative methods for assessing the success of....”

 _Still_ couldn’t stop him studying.

✦

“And bend, two, three, four....”

✦

“—can’t keep doing this.” No-nonsense woman, the Lady Admiral of Starfleet Medical, speaking gently for once. Always pictured her in a tricorne hat.

“The hell I can’t.”

“It’s been two years, Leonard.”

 _Years!_

“We’ll take care of him here but you need to get on with your life. You need to let him go.”

“He hasn’t given up yet,” Bones snapped. “Neither will I.”

✦

Woke to warmth, again -- more moments of warmth than cold, any more. Birdsong. Aches in my thin hips. His weight on the edge of the bed, shifting with excitement.

“—highly specialized, highly optimized receptor...which I _think_ could mean highly susceptible to being locked up by something that mimics natural enzymes but doesn’t respond to the body’s unlocking signal. Just because no one’s ever seen it behave that way before—”

No room for hope, in the tiny experience-spaces I collected one by one: precious sensations set in amber and strung together in time. But the quick bright sound of his voice—

✦

“—paging Doctor McCoy.”

Back in the hospital. Crap.

✦

An indefinable smell yanked my senses alert. Visitors, breathing. Soap, boot polish, faint cold-sweat odor of deep space.

“—wish we had better news for you.” Familiar Pike, so resonant and sad.

“I wish a lot of things.”

 _Mom....?!_ Pulse jumped in my veins and my fingertips twitched, but they didn’t see. Where was Bones?

Felt cool fingers brush hair off my forehead. I was nine again; wanted chicken noodle soup with all my heart.

“—was going to graduate this year.”

“Next year, you mean.” Soft, stern, certain of herself as always.

“No, he told me he was going to do it in three. The cocky bastard. And I think—”

✦

Organized chaos, hurrying feet.

“Not a chance.” Bones, his sharpest arms-folded voice. “It’s a totally experimental treatment in a wildly non-standard patient, very delicate at this stage. I cannot go, if it means leaving him behind...”

 _No!_

Cold panic almost obliterated the rest of the words.

“—worth the argument? — rescue mission — safe enough on the ship—”

✦

Hangar full of echoes and purpose. Larger than life.

 _Vulcan_ , I heard someone say. Hot dry wind swirled my memories, Mojave’s pale imagining of what _real_ hot and dry would be like, the first planet I’d hoped to visit after leaving Sol behind...

“—treatment and transport of a patient is to be determined at the discretion of his attending physician, which is _me_ , so I'm taking Mr. Kirk aboard. Or you would _you_ like to explain to Captain Pike why _Enterprise_ warped into a crisis without one of its senior medical officers?”

The _Enterprise_ — finished? ready? And we were going aboard! Bones maneuvered the hover-cot into the shuttle, strapped it in. Not drunk and ranting this time, not even scared.

“Oh Jim, you've gotta see this....” he breathed, so full of grief and awe and wonder that I fought for the ten thousandth time to surface, to speak, to move — and maybe this time something _did_ change. Eyelashes shifted apart just a slit, just enough to grasp a dusky picture of Bones’ silhouette against the window, the glowing starship outside, before the remorseless blackness swallowed it all up again....

✦

“— _detected an anomaly in the neutral zone, what appeared to be a lightning storm in space. Soon after, Starfleet received a distress signal from the Vulcan high command..._ ”

Consciousness crackled into being, in my barren brain, something out of nothing, a cosmic rabbit/hat trick, and before I could think to think ‘I think,’ the critical connections flashed together:

 _Lightning — Kelvin — dad — time — Romulans — ”where are you_ from _?” — massive firepower — eight hundred lives — dare you — red, red, RED ALERT!_

I sat up, eyes wide; body alien to me, strange and weak, but under my control at last. And everything so clear: terrible danger now, now, NOW...

“Lightning storm!” I bellowed.

“Jim, you’re awake! Good God, man!”

Bones was at my side, where he’d always been, and how had I not _known_ that before — gorgeous in his uniform, older and wearier, overwhelmed with emotion, no _time_... I grasped the sides of his face, stared into glistening gold-green eyes, heart pounding; willed him to believe me, help me, stay with me.

“ _We've gotta stop the ship._ ”

✦


End file.
